News

Q&A: Will All Movies Be 3-D in the Future?

"Within the next five to seven years, I expect all movies out of Hollywood to be in 3-D," Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO of DreamWorks Animation, said just yesterday at a conference on 3-D in Singapore. His prediction may or may not come true, but a lot of other people in Hollywood, including James Cameron, Robert Zemeckis, and Pixar's John Lasseter, are betting that 3-D will soon become a staple part of the movie-going diet, thanks in large part to improved digital 3-D production and projection technologies.

Next year, a dozen or more pictures are scheduled to be released in 3-D, including Cameron's Avatar and Zemeckis's A Christmas Carol(with Jim Carrey in multiple roles). DreamWorks Animation and Pixar have said that all their

future films will be in 3-D; Walt Disney Pictures has made a similar commitment for its cartoons (though it also has an old-fashioned 2-D hand-drawn film in the pipeline). Whether there will be enough 3-D-equipped theaters to accommodate all these movies is an open question, especially given recent economic news. (3-D conversions are expensive.) But leading the hopeful way is Disney's Bolt, a cartoon released today in both 3-D and 2-D versions.

What's indisputable is that digital technology has allowed filmmakers more control when it comes to using and manipulating depth than their forbears had during the 3-D crazes of the 50s and 80s. A couple of months ago, I had

the opportunity to visit Disney's animation studio and talk to Clark Spencer, one of the producers of Bolt, and Robert Neuman, the film's stereoscopic supervisor, about the aesthetics of 3-D.

Bruce Handy:__ People talk a lot about the technical aspects of 3-D, but tell me how you use it creatively.__

Robert Neuman: What we're interested in doing is creating kind of a more immersive experience, and using the stereoscopic depth as a storytelling tool, rather than just a gimmick. I guess the goal is to drop people into the story, rather than pulling them out of it.

And so the first thing I did when they storyboarded out the film was, I went through sequence-by-sequence, shot-by-shot, and I kind of charted what the emotional intensity was: What's the level of the conflict, the level of emotion in each shot? Once I had charted that out, then I went in and starting setting the depth. There's a big climactic action sequence--that's when I'm gonna pull out the stops and go to a deeper scene. If you have some exposition -- you know, dialogue, two characters talking -- then I'm gonna keep the depth rather modest.

It's kind of like a marathon runner. You can't run at full clip -- you're not gonna make it to the finish line. The idea is to kind of modulate the depth -- to have more gentle moments, then have kind of deeper moments. If you pick the one shot that has the maximum depth -- if we were to run the whole movie like that for, you know, 85 minutes, I'm sure we'd produce a good amount of headaches.

So you literally have to build space from scratch, the way the animators have to build everything else in a CG cartoon from scratch?

Neuman: What I'm doing is I'm saying, Here’s the closest thing in the scene--where do I want to display this? Where do I want it to be in the theater space? Out of the screen? In the screen? Basically I'm controlling the depth, the distance in our display space, between our nearest and furthest objects.

Clark Spencer: One of the benefits of the way we make films is because we do it in chunks, in terms of sequences. As Robert said, you can finish a sequence, and then go watch, you know, nine or 12 minutes of the movie. Versus live-action where they’re off shooting the whole thing then they have to come back to piece it together. So throughout the process we continue to look at sequences and making adjustments.

Neuman: You know, it's been this learning process. So the more we've done it, the better we are at kind of heading off having to do any changes.

I was told Chicken Little [Disney’s first feature to be released in a limited 3-D version, in 2005] was turned around in three or four months, from the time, when it was already almost finished in 2-D, that they decided to also do it in 3-D. That sounds pretty rushed.

Neuman: That was done differently than we're doing here. We hadn't, at that point, tried to harness the creative potential of 3-D. Chicken Little was for the most part done with kind of a single depth setting, that whole movie. Everything was contained, mostly, from the plane of the screen backwards -- a very conservative approach. Whereas starting with Meet the Robinsons[Disney’s second 3-D film, released last year], we harnessed the creative control of it, and really dialed in depth on a shot-by-shot basis. In terms of 3-D filmmaking in general, that was a big turning point, I think -- the idea of kind of modulating the depth as a matter that's going to support the story.

Can you give me an example of a scene where you felt you had to change something storywise, to take advantage of 3-D?

Neuman:____Well, the decision to do Bolt in 3-D was made before the actual production started. Maybe there were parts that were storyboarded early on, even before that decision was made. But, certainly that was all preproduction. By the time we were in production, it was always going to be 3-D.

Spencer: You have to make this decision: Are you making a movie for 3-D, or are you making a movie for 2-D? And the thought was: We should go off and design the film for 2-D, even though we know we're making a 3-D version of the film. But design it that way.

And then you have Robert working in parallel, who's looking at everything that's happening and saying: How am I gonna now take that shot and make it work as well as possible in 3-D? What happens is, you end up with some happy coincidences. So when Rhino's ball [a reference to the film’s hamster character and his plastic exercise ball] comes at you, that was never thought of as -- no one sat there and said: Oh, we should do this as—

Neuman: —the greatest 3-D moment ever!

Spencer: But it exists, and it works well, because it works in terms of how the story's being told, for both the 3-D and 2-D versions. And the same thing when Rhino goes on that board, and now he's really jutting out into the audience. When the person was storyboarding that, they never sat there and thought to themselves: Oh, we'll put him on a board -- we can jut that board out.

So what's great about the process is, you can kind of focus on the storytelling. Which really should be the driver, ultimately. And so far, on this film, we haven't actually had to go in in any place and say: Oh, we should take this moment and do it completely different for 3-D.

Neuman: I mean, there's a certain amount of compromise. But having said that, the first step in making a great 3-D film is: Make a great film, period. Right?

*Spencer:*There's a moment in the film, at the very end, where we go back to the TV show. [The film’s hero is a dog who’s the star of a souped-up Rin Tin Tin-like show.] And the TV show has kind of done the jump-the-shark thing where it's gone off the rails and it's become really crazy. And there's a shot with a needle. And we were in the room, looking at it from the storytelling standpoint and we all sort of had the same thought at the same moment, which is: His needle should come towards you. This is a great moment where 3-D can work for us, and work for us in terms of storytelling, because we want the moment to be cheesy. We want it to be something so pushed and crazy. So, in that case, we said: We really should design this shot specifically in a way that would make you laugh at it, because it's so sort of over-the-top.

Speaking of which, are there any of the older films, from the '50s or '70s, or '80s that you think made good use of 3-D, that you maybe saw as models?

Neuman: You know, it's a tough thing because it's not like in the conventional cinema where you can point to your Citizen Kane or your Lawrence of Arabia, because -- I mean, frankly, with any kind of innovation throughout the history of cinema, with each one there's been a couple of hurdles. One has been technological. Trying to make a zoom lens, for instance, it took a while to get it mechanically to the point where they could smoothly transition the focal length of the lens. And then, if you look at some of the movies that were done in the '60s, when the zoom lens was fairly new to cinema, there's these just gratuitous zoom-ins on characters. (Laughs.) These meandering pointless zooms. So that's kind of the second hurdle: the ability to harness it artistically.

Back in the early days of 3-D, they were fighting against such problems from a technological standpoint -- which, to a large extent, have now been solved by digital projection. But I think they never got far enough past the technological hurdle to really take on the artistic one. So there really aren't any great old 3-D movies. I mean, they're fun, and some of them are good as a movie. But like Dial M for Murder, if you watch that in 3-D, it's kind of neat seeing it in 3-D, but from what I understand, 3-D was kind of foisted upon Hitchcock and he didn't really do anything creatively with it. But, you know, 3-D makes it a little bit more immersive -- it's kind of interesting -- and, in general, it's a good movie.

But if you see something like House of Wax, it's kind of cheesy. They have the paddle-ball, you know, the self-conscious thing coming at the camera. So I don't think there's been the Lawrence of Arabia of 3-D cinema that you could point to.

It’s interesting that so many of the new 3-D movies are kids’ movies, because regular movies are so immersive for kids, anyway. A movie is such an intense, overwhelming experience for a kid. They don’t know it’s not real.

*Neuman:*I agree. They probably need 3-D less. I mean, their imaginations are more active and more agile. But, like I said, 3-D is like anything else. You know, it's arguably met the technological hurdle and now people are starting to use it, as we're trying to do here, as just another storytelling tool. I think it could reach the point where you could have a When Harry Met Sally in 3-D and it wouldn't be ridiculous. As the technology becomes cheaper, and people become more experienced in using it creatively, I think it'll become more ubiquitous.

*Spencer:*It's interesting to me. When I watch the film in 2-D, I feel like I'm immersed in the environment, because it's a representation of a 3-D environment. And then when I watch it in 3-D, you realize just how much immersive it can become. For a moment, I will spend time actually observing how I'm now in the middle of the set. And then I'll start to forget it -- but I've now really fallen into a world that feels like there's a real depth to it.

*Neuman:*That's part of the magic of 3-D. You have all these techniques with conventional cinema that already make the experience more immersive. We have surround sound. We have color. Digital projection gives you those really crisp images. But, then, part of the magic of the 3-D thing is, once you present, you know, two channels of information to our eyes, it's a quantum leap in how immersive it gets.

As long as 3-D is used creatively and done comfortably—when I see something that's done that way and then I go back and look at the 2-D version, it's like something's missing. You know, even though movies are as immersive as they are, once you've seen it with that little added dimension, something's missing when it's not there.